Morning Links: December 10, 2008

— Jeff Jarvis responds to the Tribune bankruptcy. A smart piece, I think, but I’d quarrel with this:

Some [newspapers] are looking at stopping publishing a day or two (which is just stupid: news never happens on Mondays?).

The point of cutting back days is not that “news never happens on Mondays.” It’s that printing a newspaper isn’t profitable on Mondays. There’d still be a little thing called a web site. I’d think Jeff would be more platform-agnostic on that point.

I think another option to not printing on Monday would be to print a small, free tab that day, supported by what advertising they could get. It’d be like the Tribune substituting a slightly-higher-brow RedEye for Monday’s regular paper. (Some might argue that the Trib is now little more than a slightly-higher-brow RedEye, but I’ll leave that for others to judge.)

The new report from the Media Insight Project looks at millennials’ habits and attitudes toward news consumption: “I really wouldn’t pay for any type of news because as a citizen it’s my right to know the news.”

News companies have moved from print dollars to digital dimes to mobile pennies. Now, with the highly anticipated launch of the Apple Watch, the screens are getting even smaller. How are smart publishers thinking about the right way to serve users and maintain their attention on smartwatches?

Instead of just publishing to their own websites, news organizations are being asked to publish directly to platforms they don’t control. Is the hunt for readers enough to justify losing some independence?